


Kyrie

by willowoftheriver



Series: fearfully made [7]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Daddy Issues, F/M, Half-Sibling Incest, Identity Issues, Self-Hatred, War, sanity slippage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 12:51:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20582807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: Merlin has an identity crisis.





	Kyrie

The first thing Merlin does—once some vague awareness of her surroundings fades back into focus—is summon the dragon.

She chooses the clearing where she and Arthur had found him so long ago, where she could’ve ordered him to stand there and be slaughtered, had her mood inclined her, and he would’ve had to have just damn well obeyed.

“_Kilgharrah_!!” she roars, and stands there, chest heaving, with her eyes fixed on the sky.

He swoops in after a moment, circling so very leisurely a few times—as though he didn’t _feel_ the rage in her call down to his very bones.

She has absolutely no patience for it, and spits words at him in a way she never has before: “_Get. Down. Here. Now._”

He lands. The ground shudders under him, and he studies her with unblinking amber eyes.

(His breath is warm as it leaves his mouth in steady exhales. But she’s still cold.)

“You knew. There’s no way you didn’t know!”

He tilts his head. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific. Vast as my knowledge is, I’m afraid I’m not quite omniscient, and the threads of Fate can occasionally be _tricky_. What is it that has _my Queen_ so upset?”

He always calls her ‘queen’ so mockingly. But she _is_ a queen, isn’t she? Not just playing dress-up as one, like she’s felt again and again over the years. _It’s in her blood_.

Merlin almost doubles over, almost gags.

“You always knew _exactly_ whose child I was, whose _bastard_—”

“Balinora? Yes, it is hard to forget one’s lord, even after parting on such _unfortunate_ terms. Just as it’s always been very hard not to see the echo of her in you, though I do promise I’ve never thought any less of you for it—”

“_Uther_!” she shrieks, the name ripped out of her lungs with a force not even the magic of the dragons’ tongue could ever replicate.

Kilgharrah goes silent. And Merlin feels . . . feels _wobbly_, like she might tip forward.

“Tell me it’s not true,” she finally manages. She hates begging him for anything, yet it always seems to come back to her doing so. “Tell me that—that Gaius is just wrong. That Balinora was lying, that—that—I don’t care if she whored herself to anyone who looked her way and didn’t even know who he was, just that _it wasn’t_—”

“Would you truly appreciate it if I did?”

Merlin does fall to her knees then. (She can’t quite recall the last time she ate, or drank, or slept. She’s not even sure of the last time she felt like she could breathe.)

“You always knew,” she mutters.

“Yes.”

“You never told me.”

“Would there have been a point?”

“A point?” And she laughs and laughs, _laughslaughslaughs_, until even Kilgharrah is shifting a touch uneasily. “I married my brother. I birthed my brother’s children. I killed Morgana, I _killed my own sister_!”

“All things that needed to happen, Merlin. Those threads of Fate came together in Balinora at your conception; I could see them even at our last meeting. Uther had accrued too great a debt to the natural order and so the seeds of his undoing were sown in his own blood. There can only ever be one _Myrddin Emrys_, and this was the only way you could’ve come to exist.”

“But Arthur . . . you’ve always said our destiny is together . . . we’re two sides of a single coin—”

“And so you are. Do not both sides of the coin come from the same metal? Is your destiny not playing out around you even as we speak?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she chokes out, and there go the tears again, welling up in her eyes. They’re never gone for long. “How could I want a destiny that my children have to pay the price for? _Die in my arms for_?”

“I recall you once said something similar about murder, but your hands are so very bloody now, and rightfully so. And more is still to stain them, to guide Fate down its course. War with Mercia was the only choice, Merlin, whatever second thoughts you might have.”

“Stop.” Most of the rigidity in her spine has slowly seeped away—all of it in her arms, too—so she just kind of inches to the ground. “Just . . . stop.”

Her royal head is pressed into the dirt. She used to sleep like this a long time ago, all throughout her childhood—on a packed dirt floor, the only consistent bed she’d ever had, and as she’d never experienced the type of comfort of the feather mattress she has now, she hadn’t been able to miss it.

And she’d been able to pillow her head on her arm, feel the brush of her own hair against her face, glimpse her nose at the very center of her vision—all without hating everything it was made from.

.

There’s a portrait of Uther that hangs in the castle, one of the few remembrances of him that exist anymore. Perhaps Arthur pauses to look at it occasionally, feel some twinge of affection for it—Merlin knows well enough that he’d never really stopped caring for his father, however distant from him he’d grown in the last years of his life.

Merlin has never stopped to look at the thing. She’d already seen far too much of the man in life, _endured_ him for years. She’d tried to stop Morgana from killing him once—had even personally saved his life on occasion—and she would make the same decisions again, but simply because Arthur hadn’t been ready to be king. And once the hateful old man finally did die, choking on blood Morgana’s assassin’s blade had pushed out of his heart, Merlin had worn black for the expected period of mourning and affected solemnity on her face. She never shed a tear.

Now she blinks them back as she stands and stares at this representation of him. It’s just what the artist could manage to recreate on canvas, a flattened mimicry of reality transmitted through a hand, but she takes in every centimeter of it. Makes a study of his face as she never did when he was actually there.

She sees so much of her children there, but so little of Arthur.

So little of _herself_.

But they both look like their mothers, don’t they? They provided the cast for the metal, so to speak.

It—the issue, the _problem_—isn’t really that Arthur is her brother. (It _is_. But it isn’t.) He’s already been so many things to her for so long. Anything brotherly has never factored into it, not even in the earliest days, when she was still so perfectly chaste she attracted unicorns and he was such an insufferable prat that the sight of his naked chest as he pranced around his chambers seemed his only redeeming feature, however brightly it made her blush.

She’d thought him so like Uther in those days. And he really had been _trying_ to be. But none of the worse traits came quite naturally to him, however high he stuck his nose in the air.

Not like they came naturally to Morgana.

Or how, in their way, they’ve come to Merlin, staining her hands red over and over again.

(The problem isn’t that Arthur is her brother, or Morgana was her sister. It’s that Uther is her father.)

.

“Tell me, Uncle,” she says as soon as she enters Gaius’s chambers, casts a spell to keep out eavesdroppers. “Is there anything else you’ve been keeping from me? Any other siblings, perhaps, that I can kill or bed?”

Gaius doesn’t turn from his worktable to face her, his hands clenching around the mortar and pestle he’s been grinding flowers into dust with. “Merlin . . .”

“Does my mothe—does Hunith know?”

After a pause, the back of his head jerks in a nod. “She was at your birth. I had hidden Balinora with her after I freed her from the dungeons.”

“Of course,” Merlin sighs. She stares down at the goblet in her hand, the off-red liquid inside. The smell alone is enough to make her grimace, but it’s the strongest wine the kitchens have to offer and she finishes it in two gulps, suppressing her shudder as it hits the back of her tongue.

It’s not like it’s even been helping overmuch. A few things have become a bit more distant from her, obscured behind an opaque curtain—that sound of her newborn’s breathing, the twitches of his dying body in her arms.

But mostly it just lets the feelings stagnate there in her chest, unmoving and festering.

“She’ll have to come here soon. Essetir’s just too close to Mercia in general.” Hunith had refused to stay in Camelot after the end of Morgana’s war, insisting she had to go and try to rebuild Ealdor. Now Merlin wonders if that was just another lie.

But nevertheless, Ealdor _was_ rebuilt, better than it had been. Merlin has ensured Hunith lives in comfort there, though it’s not like what she could’ve given her if she’d just stayed.

(Maybe she just didn’t want to keep lying to her. It would make something in Merlin’s chest loosen if she knew that for sure. But what if she just didn’t want to keep _watching_?)

Gaius finally does put down his mortar and pestle and turn around, even though it looks like it pains him just to look at her. “Merlin . . . are you _sure_ about—?”

“What else is there to do, Gaius? Bayard hasn’t responded to diplomacy. It’s not like I’m bloody _looking forward_ to it.” She slams her goblet down on a table with a thunk, leans against it and crosses her arms over her chest. The crows that have taken to lingering on her shoulders flutter their wings in upset, while one flees her entirely. It lands on the edge of Gaius’s leech tank and plucks one up, jerking its head upwards so it slides down its throat whole.

She has so many memories of this place, good and bad. Back when life seemed to thrum with excitement through her veins and the future was so very wide and distant.

“I think I want to study with you again,” she says suddenly, eyeing the medical texts lined up along his shelves.

One of his white eyebrows rises to his hairline. “I’m sorry?”

“Medicine.”

He blinks. “Would that be appropriate for a queen?”

“I don’t care.”

“Would you even have time?”

“I’ll find the time.”

“You weren’t very good at it back then.”

She clicks her tongue. “Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t exactly devoting myself to it at the time?”

“I could never fathom such a thing,” he deadpans.

It makes her lips twitch up, just the slightest bit. And for a second, she can almost forget what he’d had hiding behind his eyes all of that time.

.

Winter is generally not a season when wars are fought, which in this case gives them time to prepare for what’s coming.

Merlin is not truly on Arthur’s war council, save what input she can give for how best to use the magical conscripts. She’s not been trained in warfare or strategy and all of this sitting at a table as figures of troops are pushed around a map isn’t her forte.

Sir Gwaine does do his best to liven it up, as always, but her thoughts can’t help but wander as she sits there, off down the same dark paths they’ve traversed for weeks.

(She so desperately doesn’t want time to think anymore. To sit in stillness and feel the blood pumping through her chest.)

“_Mer_lin.”

Arthur’s voice is annoyed, but when her eyes finally snap to focus, he can’t hide the concern on his face quickly enough for her not to catch it.

“I asked who you would prefer to remain here to head up security for you and the city?”

She smiles with what she personally thinks is an impressive façade of cheerful flippancy. “For me? Surely even_ you_ couldn’t have forgotten. I’m a High Priestess of the Old Religion—no mortal blade can kill me.”

She swallows heavily when she hears the echo of Morgana in her own words. (And all at once, she feels her blood still warm on her hands, seeping down her arms.) But she doesn’t let the smile slip.

“Be that as it may,” he says with a roll of his eyes, “you have to choose someone.”

She gives a put upon sigh and looks around the table, eyes passing over Gwaine and Leon, Percival and Lancelot. She actually manages some true warmth in her face as she looks at them.

But it evaporates the instant she lands on the one she knew all along would be her choice. “Sir Mordred.”

Arthur stares at her. His advisors stare at her. The knights stare at her. Even Mordred himself looks incredibly confused.

That she holds no favor for Sir Mordred is certainly a well-known fact at court by this point. Arthur has asked her why more than once, but the words always seem to refuse to come. Perhaps she got so used to protecting him like this, all concealed within herself, that she doesn’t know how to do it any other way.

“Really?” Arthur asks, trying to keep some of the blatant disbelief from his voice.

“I feel a knight with magical skill would be best. After all, something that might be able to get close enough to infiltrate the city probably wouldn’t be able to be killed just by hitting it with a sword.”

Arthur shrugs after a beat, claps Mordred hard on the shoulder. “Hate to lose you for this; you’re one of my best. But it looks like you’ve got the Lady’s favor.”

Mordred isn’t _one of _the best. He’s _the best_, second only to Arthur, and it happened with such rapidness that it’s left Merlin chilled to the bone, waking at night in a cold sweat with afterimages of a hundred different versions of the same nightmare still lingering in her mind.

Merlin isn’t in a position to accompany Arthur to battlefields anymore. But if she can’t be there, she’ll make sure that Mordred isn’t, either. She’ll suffer his presence simply because she doesn’t trust him out of her sight.

Talk turns elsewhere, off onto something about supply lines. Then something about banners.

(Merlin wonders if Balinora sat like this once. With Uther.)

_Emrys?_ comes a tentative voice, stretching out cautiously to flit through the topmost layer of her mind.

Merlin doesn’t answer him. (She never once has, all the time he’s been here.)

.

This winter is harsher than it needs to be. No one starves, but this is the first time Arthur’s subjects have ever had reason to doubt her.

No, not her—her _abilities_.

The Druids think she’s life incarnate, but that’s just her magic, and she’s never before felt so acutely aware of how her body exists around it. Outside of it. Flesh and muscle built up in the water of the womb just the same as anyone else.

(She wants to burn that portrait of Uther, more than she ever has before.

_She wants to open herself up and scratch him out of her bones._)

.

When the spring thaw finally comes, and the army enters its final stage of mobilization, Arthur requests specifically that she come dress him for his ride out. It wouldn’t have been notable only a few months ago—wouldn’t have even needed to be requested, as while bootlicking George had stepped into her place as Arthur’s personal servant, she’d always still carried on her routine of performing the most intimate tasks.

But Merlin has taken to her own rooms this winter, both morning and night. Through the highest hours of the day, she attends court. She attends council meetings. Sometimes she even watches the knights practice in the training yard. And during it all she scrutinizes Arthur’s face, trying to find some part of herself in it that she’s missed for all these years.

She’s told him, the one time she spoke of it at all, that this changes nothing. (He agrees.) She’s always been happy to be his everything, servant or mistress or whatever else he decided to bestow on her. Fate had decided that she should be his protector as well, and now it’s finally deigned to reveal this one last thing it had always had waiting just out of sight.

So be it.

But she hasn’t woken up beside him in months. Hasn’t dressed him.

It comes back to her naturally, of course. She’s nearly lost count of how many years she’s been doing it.

(She’s always thought it was ridiculous that Uther hadn’t thought it necessary his son should have so basic a skill as putting his own clothes on properly, but here they are.)

“Will you miss me?” he asks her, his tone carefully teasing, as she walks him over to stand in better light.

“Of course not,” she says with a small smile. “I can already feel myself getting mad with regency power.”

She can’t . . . quite keep the smile on her face as she thinks of Morgana, of how maybe something sleeping in her blood could sneak up on her and make that statement perfectly true before she even realizes it.

Arthur’s hand comes up too quickly for her to avoid it, snatches her chin between his fingers. He forces her to tilt her face upwards, but she doesn’t meet his eyes—instead she watches his mouth move with his breaths, stares at the flesh that’s made up of something that makes her, too.

“Do you think he knew?” she asks before she can stop herself.

He sighs, immediately followed by his throat clicking as he swallows roughly. “We’ll never know.”

“He knew I was Balinora’s daughter. He—he _had_ to have—”

“I think that . . . sometimes . . . Fath—” He quickly thinks better of using that word. “—_he_ believed what he wanted to.”

Merlin can only bark out a laugh, because after this long, _that’s_ the harshest summation of Uther he can make? That willful ignorance must run in the family. (_Their_ family.)

She chokes off into some kind of a sob. “I lived in fear of that man for years.”

“I know,” he says, pushing her head to his chest, stroking a hand over her hair. “I know.”

“I was glad when he died, even though it hurt you. Usually I share in all your pain, Arthur, but not then.”

For the first time in a long time, Merlin thinks of Will. _That_ was a death that had wounded her. And she can’t help but wonder at the possibility—where her mind would be this same day, if she’d just stayed in Ealdor and taken Will’s courting seriously. So many comforts she wouldn’t know to miss. So much ignorance of what she was capable of, her hands clean and bloodless as they grew ragged from work in the fields.

Her magic might’ve festered stagnant inside her, but she would’ve never known Uther.

That wasn’t her destiny, though. And Arthur would be dead by now.

(_Destiny_ has had so many little cruelties planned out for her, lying in wait amongst everything else to snap up and strike when she least expected it. She hates it for that.

But she could never wish it gone, because she can’t even think of an existence without Arthur in it.)

“I will miss you,” she mutters.

She can feel the hint of his smile even though she can’t see it. She doesn’t look up at his face—instead, she taps his side, a long-held cue that he should lift his arms. And he does, but they fall heavily back to her as soon as his shirt has slid off.

Merlin lets them there.

(She’s been called a whore before. Usually not to her face, unless Uther or Morgana were truly taking the path of least resistance that day, but it was whispered behind her back for years. She was the Prince’s glorified whore, dressed up as a maidservant, and after she’d conceived Balin, the whole castle had known it with no room left for doubt.

Now she’s a woman wed, her head crowned in the sight of the old spirits of the land and the new god of the heavens. More _legitimate _than she’s ever been.

But as Arthur fucks her with the desperation of man soon to be lost at war, she’s never felt more like his whore.)

.

There’s a brief ceremony in which Merlin kneels at the throne, Arthur’s seed still cooling on her thighs beneath her skirts and her breasts aching with the imprint of his teeth, and is officially declared _Myrddin_ _regina_, Queen-regent of all the lands of Camelot.

(And she almost sways there on her knees; almost laughs until she suffocates herself to death. Because they _are_ her lands, aren’t they, more than she ever knew. Yet some bastard girl’s blood isn’t good for anything. It’s only marriage that ever could’ve seen her here.)

(Uther never would’ve acknowledged her, even if he’d known. Fuck him, and all the land he never deserved to have.)

She’s still wearing her jeweled silver crown as she follows the procession of Arthur and his knights to the courtyard. She stands there in the misty light of the mid-morning with her ladies and retainers, members of the council, even Branwen and Alaric, the latter of whom tries to be stoic as he says goodbye to his father and older brothers.

Balin tries to be just as stoic back, and blushes when Merlin pecks a kiss on his forehead.

“_Mother_,” he hisses, scandalized.

Constantine laughs and leans over to her, bracing a hand behind her head as he presses his lips to both sides of her face. “Fare thee well, Mother,” he says. “I’ll try not to die tragically in battle. Any idea of my luck, Branwen?”

Branwen smiles airily, as she often does. “I don’t know.”

Constantine snorts in skepticism, mounting his horse in one heaving motion. “So no advice?”

“Little details usually aren’t important.”

“‘Little details.’” He rolls his eyes.

Of course Merlin is scared. She mumbles protection spell after protection spell, incantations she’s been researching all winter in books from all corners of the world. But she knows Arthur has good men with him—some who have been there since the earliest days, others new. Young Sir Galahad, still as wide eyed as when he’d first arrived, has saddled up beside his father, and Gwen—for all that she hadn’t been entirely thrilled to learn of his existence at first—is warmly wishing him well with all the same genuineness she directs at Lancelot.

(And the one man who shouldn’t be with Arthur isn’t. He stands beside her, a loathsome presence in her peripheral vision.)

“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to any of us?” Arthur asks Branwen, a crooked smile on his face.

She shrugs. “No point.”

Arthur frowns, as he frequently does at Branwen, and pats her on the head, ruffling a few of the jet-black strands of her hair. Then his eyes seek out Merlin’s, linger there until she gives him just a small smile.

Then, in an instant, he’s spurring his horse into motion, galloping from the courtyard followed by a stream of glinting chainmail and billowing red cloaks.

Merlin bites her lip, hard, as she watches him go. Tries to stamp down how very powerless she feels, to not _be there_ in the same way she’d been accustomed to for so long.

“You should’ve said goodbye to them,” she tells her daughter, just for something to say as the deafening pound of hooves fades away. (As security seems to gush out from between her fingers to lie dead and twitching on the ground.)

Branwen sighs, lets her head fall to Merlin’s shoulder. She displaces the crows there. “Oh, Mother. It doesn’t matter. Soon you’re going to have an island.”

**Author's Note:**

> Merlin is Not Well At All.
> 
> So I put this both in the old series and also started a new one with it as the first installment. There's going to be a substantial amount of Merlin/Mordred coming up, and I realize that probably a lot of people who've read this far wouldn't be down with that, so this way it can be taken to just end here if that's what you'd prefer.
> 
> I always wondered how Arthur was supposed to unite Albion without out and out conquering it by force, so that's what I'm going with.
> 
> 'Kyrie' of course comes from the Kyrie Eleison, but it's also the name of a song on the Death Note soundtrack.
> 
> -Anna


End file.
